quotations about reality
The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
I realized that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY
attributed, Mystery in Life
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?
GEORGE BERKELEY
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
By changing your mind, you change everything.
PATANJALI
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
O the heart has dreams Elysian!
That steal o'er it calm and sweet,
Hushing pain like a magician
Who binds spirits at his feet.
WALTER RICHARD CASSELS
"Reality", Eidolon, or the Course of a Soul and Other Poems
Better to bridge the gap between virtual reality and reality reality by marrying the two, by enhancing our environment and finding further means to access those populating it, even if through a game.
AMANDA KNOX
"Amanda's View: Reality is Better", Ballard News Tribune
Reality is not a fad That changes with the latest whim.
DAVID EDWIN HALL
"Rejoicing in Reality", Quiet Time Poems
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Against Certainty"
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
Reality is subject to the mind's creation.
DIANE STEIN
Essential Reiki
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
There are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
The angel of reality is unknowable, a figure only partially apprehended, then transformed into something else in continuous movement--here and then gone.
DAVID MICHAEL HERTZ
Angels of Reality
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
letter to Countee Cullen, 1943